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MACivAIL 
Shakespeare  after  three  hundred 
years 


OJ    'U0|>|D0I5 


—     ~  pjoji 


THE  BRITISH  ACADEMY 


THE  ANNUAL  SHAKESPEARE  LECTURE 

1916 


Shakespeare  after 
Three  Hundred  Years 


By 

J.   W.  Mackail 

Fellow  of  the  Academy 


NEW  YORK 
OXFORD  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

AMERICAN  BRANCH:  85  West  S2nd  STMrr 

LONDON,  TORONTO.  MELBOURNE.  AND  BOMBAY 
HUMPHREY  MILFORD 

1916 


THE  BRITISH  ACADEMY 


THE  ANNUAL  SHAKESPEARE  LECTURE 

1916 


Shakespeare  after 
Three  Hundred  Years 


By 

J.   W.  Mackail 

[Fellow  of  the  Academy 


NEW  YORK 
OXFORD  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

AMERICAN  BRANCH:  S5  West  82nd  Street 

LONDON,  TORONTO.  MELBOURNE,  AND  BOMBAY 
HUMPHREY  MILFORD 

1916 


Copyright  in  the  United  States  of  America 

by  the  Oxford  University  Press 

American  Branch 

1916 


/  t 


LIBRARY 

•CNIVERSn  Y  OF  CAIJFORMA 

SANTA  BARBARA 


ANNUAL  SHAKESPEARE  LECTURE,  1916 

SHAKESPEARE  AFTER  THREE 
HUNDRED  YEARS 

By  J.  W.  MACKAIL 

FELLOW    OF    THE    ACADEMY 

Five  years  ago,  His  Excellency  the  French  Ambassador  to  the 
United  States  delivered  the  first  of  the  Shakespeare  lectures  on  this 
foundation.  His  address  remains  in  the  memory  of  all  who  heard 
or  read  it.  But  we  may  more  particularly  and  with  special  warmth 
of  gratitude  recall  how  he  began  with  a  reference  to  the  new  under- 
standing that  had  grown  uj)  between  our  two  nations ;  how  felici- 
tously he  quoted  Ronsard's  lines  written  in  the  year  of  Shake- 
speare's birth;  and  his  expression  of  the  hope  that  the  golden  age 
of  firm  amity  to  which  the  national  French  poet  had  looked  for- 
ward might,  in  our  time,  come  to  be.  The  friendship  has  been  knit 
close  now ;  but  for  the  golden  age,  alas !  Yet  if  some  word  may 
be  conveyed  to  our  ally  now  in  reply  to  that  word  of  friendship,  it 
would  be  that  England  lias  resolved  to  make  good  all  that  France 
can  hope  and  expect  from  her.  The  message  you  would  wish  to 
give  from  the  English  nation  is  that  of  the  words  ])ut  by  Shake- 
speare, just  three  hundred  years  before  M.  Jusscrand's  address, 
in  the  mouth  of  Posthumus  when  he  says  in  Rome  of  his  British 
countrymen : 

Their  discipline. 

Now  mingled  with  their  courages,  will  make  known 

To  their  approvers,  they  are  people  such 

That  mend  upon  the  world. 

In   humility,  but   with   quiet   confidence,   we  would   repeat   these 
words  now. 

This  is  the  tercentenary,  not  of  any  work  or  word  of  Shake- 
speare's, but  of  his  death.  I  come  (it  might  almost  be  said)  to  bury 
Shakespeare,  not  to  praise  him.     It  would  be  using  the  occasion 


4  ANNUAL  SHAKESPEARE  LECTURE,  1916 

amiss  to  make  it  one  of  mere  customary  and  recapitulated  eulogy. 
For  the  time  is  one  which  calls  on.  us  to  revise  all  our  values.  It 
calls  on  us  to  discard  our  formulae  and  break  our  idols. 

Disrobe  the  images 
If  you  do  find  them  decked  with  ceremonies. 

With  what  we  have  loved,  as  well  as  with  what  we  have  indolently 
accepted,  this  revaluation  has  to  be  made.  Analysis  and  em- 
broidery have  for  ages  worked  in  or  round  Shakespeare.  Now 
that  both  processes  may  seem,  for  the  time  being,  to  have  reached 
exhaustion,  it  is  worth  while  to  try  to  stand  back  from  them ;  to  ask 
ourselves  what  Shakespeare  really  was,  and  what  after  three  cen- 
turies he  really  is.  For  doing  so,  the  time  is  doubly  apt.  Industry 
and  research  have  accumulated,  one  may  say  with  some  confidence, 
all  the  facts  that  are  of  any  importance,  besides  many  more  that 
are  of  none;  and  have  not  only  accumulated,  but  weighed  and 
assorted  them.  Sir  Sidney  Lee*s  Life  in  its  latest  form,  a  monu- 
mental tribute  to  the  anniversary  which  we  are  celebrating,  sums  up 
and  sets  forth  the  ascertained  and  ascertainable  information.  To 
the  appreciation,  the  \ntal  interpretation  of  Shakespeare,  no  like 
limit  can  be  put;  for  the  secret  of  art  is  never  to  be  won  from  her. 
Yet  even  in  this  we  may  make  a  pause,  and  ask  how,  in  effect,  the 
matter  stands. 

*  Let  not  my  love  be  called  idolatry,'  Sliakespcarc  wrote  in  the 
Sonnets,  *  or  my  beloved  as  an  idol  shew.'  It  is  a  counsel  to  be 
borne  in  mind.  '  Idolatry  of  Shakespeare,'  said  Gibbon,  with  that 
•stately  detachment  which  is  often  mistaken  for  sarcasm,  '  is  incul- 
cated from  our  infancy  as  the  first  duty  of  an  Englishman.'  His 
canonization  had  already  begun  when  Jonson  broke  out  with  his 
petulant  but  not  unreasonable  protest,  '  I  loved  the  man,  and  do 
honour  his  memory  on  this  side  idolatry  as  much  as  any.'  It 
became  a  fixed  doctrine  within  a  century.  Drydcn  had  already 
given  his  magnificent  praise;  Pope,  witli  a  fine  and  discriminating 
touch,  noted  that  '  men  of  judgment  tliink  they  do  any  man  more 
service  in  praising  him  justly  than  lavishly.'  '  Poets,'  he  adds — 
and  the  words  are  an  anticipatory  comment  on  much  later  Shake- 
spearian criticism — *  are  always  afraid  of  envy ;  but  sure  they 
have  as  much  reason  to  be  afraid  of  admiration.'  Yet  Pope  him- 
self says  of  him,  in  words  no  less  true  than  noble,  that  '  he  is  not 
so  much  an  imitator  as  an  instrument  of  nature,  and  'tis  not  so 
just  to  say  he  speaks  from  her,  as  that  she  spoke  through  him,' 

Upon  the  enthusiasm  of  the  eighteenth  ccnturv,  formulated  as 
It  advanced  into  that  fixed  idolatry  recorded  by  Gibbon,  came  the 


SHAKESPEARE  AFTER  THREE  HUNDRED  YEARS  5 

analysis  of  more  fully  equipped  critics,  and  then  the  new  idolatry 
of  the  romantic  revival.  That  revival,  like  all  revolutions,  had 
been  long  prepared  for,  and,  like  all  successful  revolutions,  resulted 
in  something  different  from  what  its  authors  meant.  Its  results 
upon  Shakespeare,  when  it  wrought  out  its  effect,  were  twofold. 
On  the  one  hand  it  quickened  interest,  and  opened  out  regions  in 
him  which  till  then  had  been  left  unexplored. '  On  the  other  hand 
it  erected  him  into  something  supcrnaturally  inspired  and  m^'steri- 
ously  impeccable.  Behind  Coleridge  and  Hazlitt  came  up  the  army 
of  expounders,  prophets  of  their  enthroned  divinity.  It  was  not 
sufficient  that  they  should  show  Shakespeare  to  be,  what  he  was,  an 
adept  in  stagecraft,  a  master  of  language,  the  wielder  of  a  versifica- 
tion unmatched  for  bright  speed  and  supple  strength.  It  was  not 
sufficient  that  they  should  reaffinn  hmi  to  be  an  instrument  of 
nature.  He  must  needs  be  also  a  profound  thinker,  a  great  teacher, 
an  author  in  Avhose  works  may  be  found  the  key  to  all  problems, 
and  the  (juintessence  of  human  wisdom.  Nothing  less  than  uni- 
versal knowledge,  nothing  short  of  a  doctrine  and  a  message  on  all 
the  matters  which  concern  life,  was  claimed  for  one  who  was. 
assumed  and  believed  to  be,  in-  Coleridge's  phrase,  '  nn'riad- 
minded  '  and  supernaturally  gifted :  '  the  guide  and  the  pioneer  ' 
(Coleridge's  words  again)  '  of  true  philosophy.'  In  him,  as  in  a 
Bible,  all  schools  found  what  they  sought. 

This  excess  provoked  its  own  reaction.  Shakespeare  the  idol  had 
swollen  to  such  prodigious  proportions  that  he  began  to  topple 
over.  Devotion  led  to  research ;  research  raised  doubts  and  started 
theories;  the  process  of  destructive  criticism  began.  Under  a  mis- 
application of  scientific  method,  the  Shakespearian  environment 
threatened  to  swamp  Shakespeare.  The  invention  of  new  criteria 
for  determining  authorship  in  writings  of  mixed  composition  led  to 
the  early  vagaries  of  the  New  Shakspere  Society,  in  which  most  of 
the  plays  were  taken  away  from  him  and  parcelled  out  among  a 
dozen  of  his  contemporaries.  The  width  of  knowledge  assigned  to 
him  by  his  idolaters  misled  a  school,  which  still  subsists,  instead  of 
questioning  the  premises,  to  draw  from  them  a  3'et  more  pre- 
posterous conclusion. 

^Modern  idolatry  keeps  breaking  out  in  fresh  forms,  even  more 
vagrant  and  fantastical.  The  illusion  of  reality  in  Shakespeare's 
characters  is  so  powerful  that  they  are  thought  of  as  existing 
outside  and  apart  from  the  plays  themselves ;  as  though  Shake- 
speare had  suppressed  or  falsified  material  facts  about  them,  as 
though  the  action  in  the  plays  had  been  misconceived  by  him,  or 
were  a  fragment  only  of  some  larger  whole  which  our  superior 


6  ANNUAL  SHAKESPEARE  LECTURE,  1916 

insight  enables  us  to  reconstitute.  Like  the  conjectural  emenda- 
tions of  a  text  based  on  the  inquiry  not  what  the  author  wrote  but 
what  he  ought  to  have  written,  these  conjectural  extensions  and 
reconstitutions  offer  a  large  playground.  There  is  no  danger  in 
them  so  long  as  it  is  realized  that  they  leave  Shakespeare  himself 
untouched.  Fletcher  wrote  The  Tamer  Tamed  as  a  continuation, 
or  a  rejoinder,  to  The  Taming  of  the  Shrew.  A  modern  author  has 
written  a  play  introducing  a  younger  Lear  and  his  wife  ('  which  her 
name  is  Mrs.  Harris  ')  with  Goneril  as  a  girl.  These  are  legitimate 
exercises  of  fancy.  And  there  is  no  reason  why  any  one  should  not 
take  the  subject  of  one  of  Shakespeare's  plays  and  make  a  better 
play  of  it — if  he  can.  But  to  read  a  philosophy  into  Shakespeare, 
or  to  invent  some  '  obsession  '  in  him  and  hunt  for  traces  of  it 
throughout  his  work,  is  not  only  idle  but  hurtful;  because  this 
stands  between  us  and  Shakespeare  and  vitiates  our  view  of  him. 
To  the  older  heresy  which  claimed  for  its  idol  omniscience  and 
infallibility,  to  those  for  whom 

He  is  their  God :  he  leads  them  like  a  thing 
Made  by  some  other  deity  than  nature. 
That  shapes  men  better, 

it  might  gently  be  answered : 

A  rarer  spirit  never 
Did  steer  humanity ;  but  you  Gods  will  give  us 
Some  faults  to  make  us  men. 

To  the  newer  theorists  it  may  rather  be  said  more  sharply : 

With  what's  unreal  thou  coactive  art 
And  fcllow'st  nothing. 

To  recall  criticism  from  such  extravagances,  it  is  only  necessary 
to  notice  facts.  The  *  spaciousness  '  of  the  Elizabethan  age  is 
largely  an  illusion.  It  was  a  period  of  material  expansion  and  of 
intellectual  activity ;  but  it  was  also  one  of  contraction,  of  low 
morality  and  debased  art.  Humanism  had  not  struck  deep  in  Eng- 
land. The  reformation  carried  out  by  the  Tudor  monarchy,  in 
the  phrase  of  an  eminent  historian,  laid  its  foundations  in  the 
murder  of  the  Englisli  Erasmus,  and  set  up  its  gates  in  the  blood  of 
the  English  Petrarch.  In  the  year  when  Shakespeare  came  to 
London,  what  was  left  of  the  English  Renaissance  died  with  Sidney. 
The  provincial  middle  class  to  which  Shakespeare  belonged  in- 
herited, as  they  transmitted,  the  insular  virtue  of  easy-going 
good  temper,  and  the  insular  failings  of  grossness,  slovenliness,  and 


SHAKESPEARE  AFTER  THREE  HUNDRED  YEARS  7 

indolence.  The  first  of  the  Shakespeares  mentioned  in  records  was 
hanged.  The  first  mention  of  Shakespeare's  own  father  is  of  his 
being  fined  for  keeping  a  dungliill  in  front  of  his  house,  and  the 
last,  that  he  died  intestate  in  a  muddle  of  petty  embarrassments. 
The  child  of  a  shiftless  family  in  a  decaying  little  country  town 
might  seem  born  to  float  with  the  stream. 

In  effect,  he  did  so ;  and  in  that  lies  the  paradox,  and  in  some 
sense  the  secret,  of  his  unique  greatness.  From  first  to  last  he 
moves  through  life 

With  such  a  careless  force  and  forceless  care 
As  if  that  luck,  in  very  spite  of  cunning, 
Bade  him  win  all. 

The  stream  on  which  he  floated  he  took  alwa3-s  at  the  flood.  He 
strove  with  none,  not  because  none  was  worth  his  strife,  but 
because  temper  did  not  force  him,  or  occasion  induce  him,  to  strive. 
He  fitted  into  his  environment  (to  use  a  Homeric  simile)  like  an 
onion  into  its  coat,  at  every  point  in  close  touch  and  engagement, 
with  no  gap  and  Avith  no  friction.  By  native  instinct  he  takes  the 
line  of  least  resistance,  adapting  himself  to  fashion  and  circum- 
stance with  complete  flexibility.  When  still  a  boy,  he  accepts  unre- 
sistingly the  marriage  arranged  for  him  by  Anne  Hathaway's  rela- 
tions. Three  years  later  he  slips  away,  leaving  his  '  clog  ' — it  is 
the  word  used  by  Autolycus  of  Perdita — behind.  He  launches  on 
London  life,  and  takes  to  it  like  a  duck  to  water.  The  '  moral 
incoherence  '  which  has  been  noted  in  the  Elizabethan  drama  was 
common  to  stage  and  audience.  But  among  actors  and  playwrights 
it  was  accompanied  by  an  actual  immorality  which  excused  if  it 
did  not  justify  the  strictures  of  the  Puritans,  and  the  repeated  but 
ineffective  attempts  of  the  Privy  Council  to  close  the  theatres  alto- 
gether. The  miserable  end  of  Greene,  the  more  tragic  and  not  less 
squalid  death  of  Marlowe  a  few  months  later,  were  prologues  to  the 
Shakespearian  age,  and  give  a  lurid  register  of  the  soil  and  atmos- 
phere in  which  the  Shakesperian  drama  came  to  being : 

Things  outward 
Do  draw  the  inward,  quality  after  them 
To  suffer  all  alike. 

In  that  turbid  sea  of  life  Shakespeare  finds  himself.  He  as- 
similates everything  he  sees  and  hears  and  touches,  always  ready  to 
do  anything,  and  doing  everything  well.  Poetry  was  in  fashion, 
and  patronage  was  valuable;  so  he  writes  Venus  and  Adonis,  and 
dedicates  it  to  the  greatest  of  his  great  acquaintances,  a  dissolute 


8  ANNUAL  SHAKESPEARE  LECTURE,  1916 

young  lord  of  nineteen;  the  theatres  being  closed  for  the  plague, 
he  follows  up  that  first  adventure  with  Lucrece,  but  never  after- 
wards publishes  a  line.  Two  months  after  his  only  son's  death — 
an  unusual  time  for  such  a  thing — he  applies  for  a  coat  of  arms, 
and  next  spring  buys  New  Place.  Then  the  current  takes-  a  new 
turn,  and  he  with  it ;  he  goes  back  to  his  professional  work,  not 
now  as  an  assistant,  but  as  a  manager,  for  ten  years  more.  By 
then  he  had  come  to  the  time  of  life  when  people  begin  to  prefer 
comfort  to  pleasure,  and  to  know  what  they  do  not  want.  But 
there  was  more  in  it  than  that.  Puritanism  was  becoming  the 
rising  force  in  England.  John  Hall,  Susanna's  husband,  was  a 
strong  Puritan ;  and  not  only  did  she  adopt  her  husband's  way  of 
thinking,  but  Shakespeare  himself  acquiesced  in  it.  At  his  enter- 
tainments of  Puritan  preachers  in  New  Place  one  seems  to  hear 
him  saying,  '  I'll  ne'er  be  drunk  whilst  I  live  again,  but  in  honest, 
civil,  godly  company :  if  I  be  drunk,  I'll  be  drunk  with  those  that 
have  the  fear  of  God.'  A  conformist  by  instinct,  he  confonned 
to  the  ways  of  Stratford  as  he  had  done  to  the  ways  of  London. 
Yet  local  chatter  was  not  silenced.  It  breaks  out  in  the  loose 
gossip  that  '  he  died  a  Papist,'  and  survives  in  the  curiousW  sub- 
acid flavour  of  the  lines  written  long  after  on  Susanna's  tomb- 
stone beside  her  father's : 

Witty  above  her  sexe,  but  that's  not  all. 
Wise  to  salvation  was  good  Mistris  Hall ; 
Something  of  Shakespeare  was  in  that,  but  this 
Wholy  of  him  with  whom  she's  now  in  blisse. 

Shakespeare  himself,  the  suggestion  is,  Avas  not  of  the  compan3% 

The  epithets  '  sweet,'  '  pleasant,'  '  gentlg,'  habitually  applied  to 
him  by  his  contemporaries,  imply  tliis  flexibility  of  soft  manners 
and  far  from  rigid  morals^  as  do  tlic  few  anecdotes  of  him  which 
have  any  claim  to  authenticity.  They  show  him  at  all  events  as 
one  who  was  acquiescent  and  not  assertive,  who  avoided  contro- 
versy, who  chose  the  easiest  way.  And  this  brings  us  up  to  a 
point  which  has  been  so  far  neglected  or  missed  that  it  may  seem, 
if  baldly  stated,  not  only  paradoxical  but  shocking.  A  forgotten 
artist  of  the  last  century,  stumbling  in  his  simplicity  upon  what 
had  eluded  wiser  heads,  and  what  would  be  angrily  or  contemptu- 
ously til  rust  aside  hy  Shakespeare's  idolaters,  put  it  with  startling 
clearness  in  four  words:  'Shakespeare  was  like  putty.*  'Shake- 
speare was  like  putty  to  everybody  and  everything:  the  willing 
slave,  pulled   out,  patted   down,  squeezed  anyhow,  clay  to  every 


SHAKESPEARE  AFTER  THREE  HUNDRED  YEARS  9 

potter.  But  he  knew  by  the  phistic  liand  what  the  nature  of  the 
moulder  was.' 

That  is  true;  and  it  is  essential  to  true  appreciation.  At  the 
touch  of  this  thin  shaft  of  light,  the  facts  rearrange  themselves, 
the  puzzle  straightens  itself  out.  One  begins  to  see  how  it  might 
be  that  in  his  life  he  was  generally  classed  as  onl}'  one  among 
others,  and  that  his  death — a  thing  that  has  often  moved  wonder — 
passed  wholly  unnoticed,  and  did  not  call  forth,  in  tliat  copiously 
elegiac  age,  a  single  line  of  elegy.  He  did  not  impress  his  con- 
temporaries greatly.  Very  likely  we  also  might  find  him  quite 
unimpressive,  simpl}'  because  he  would  not  be  occupied  in  impress- 
ing us.  He  would  be  doing  something  quite  different :  taking  our 
impression.  Shakespeare  had  le  don  terrible  de  la  faiuiliarite; 
*  every  lane's  end,  every  shop,  church,  session,  hanging,  j'ields  a 
careful  man  work.'  '  He  hath  known  3'ou  but  three  days,'  says 
Valentine  to  Viola  of  the  Duke,  '  and  already  3'ou  are  no 
stranger  ' :  with  Shakespeare,  it  would  have  taken  three  minutes. 
Not  a  word,  not  a  humour,  not  a  quality,  but  he  immediatel}^  took 
its  impress.  On  that  amazing  sensitive-plate  were  recorded  every 
lineament  of  body  and  mind,  '  all  forms,  all  pressures  past,  that 
youth  and  observation  copied  there.'  In  that  even  more  amazing 
developing-room  the  records  were  put  together,  and  were  reeled 
out  so  as  to  give  the  vibrating  effect  of  life,  yet  of  a  life  swifter, 
tenser,  more  vivid  than  that  of  our  own  actual  experience.  At 
will  he  could  set  that  film-world  of  impressions  into  motion,  could 
make  its  figures  speak,  act,  think  or  feel,  exult  or  suffer,  as 
though  they  were  reall^^  alive. 

Sine  ira  et  studio,  the  loft}'  ideal  of  the  historian,  was  for  such 
a  faculty  almost  a  matter  of  course.  Nothing  in  Shakespeare  is 
more  remarkable  than  his  conspicuous  fairness  to  all  his  charac- 
ters. He  has  no  favourites ;  he  has,  one  may  even  say,  no  antipa- 
thies. That  fairness,  that  clarity  of  representation,  is  the  index 
partly  of  an  indulgent  temper,  but  more  largely  of  a  sensitiveness 
which  is  in  touch  with  the  whole  of  life,  not  intermittently  but 
continuously,  a  dramatic  or  (to  use  the  Greek  term)  imitative 
power  which  never  sleeps.  His  attitude  towards  his  own  creations 
— Sh^dock  for  instance,  or  Falstaff — has  been  warmly  debated ; 
really,  he  has  no  attitude  towards  them ;  he  gives  us  them  for  what 
they  are:  with  their  virtues  and  vices,  their  strength  and  weakness, 
neither  isolated  nor  commented  upon,  but  recorded.  With  these, 
as  with  others,  we  must  end  by  taking  them  as  they  are  given. 
'  Generally,  in  all  shapes  that  man  goes  up  and  down  in,  from 
fourscore  to  thirteen,  this  spirit   walks   in.'     From   fourscore  to 


10  AXXU.AX  SHAKESPEARE  LECTURE,  1916 

thirteen;  from  Lear  to  Juliet!  We  are  hardly  justified  in  saying 
that  Shakespeare  hates  even  his  villains,  or  loves  even  his  heroines. 
Lady  Macbeth,  even  if  not  what  she  has  been  lately  called  by  a 
diligent  Shakespearian  student,  '  a  sunny,  bright,  dainty  little 
woman,'  is,  as  Mr.  Bradley  has  pointed  out,  '  up  to  her  light,  a 
perfect  wife.'  The  Queen  in  Cymbeline  is,  with  the  same  reserva- 
tion, a  perfect  mother.  King  John  can  retain  to  the  end  the 
absolute  loyalty  of  Faulconbridge.  Edmund  was  beloved.  The 
one  figure  in  Shakespeare  for  whom  Shakespeare  shows  something 
like  antipathy  is  lago ;  and  lago  is  not  quite  a  real  person.  '  I  am 
not  what  I  am  '  are  his  own  enigmatic  but  significant  words. 

lago's  sentence  is  the  direct  negative  of  what  Shakespeare  says 
of  himself  in  a  sonnet  which  is  admittedly  autobiographical :  '  I 
am  that  I  am.'  '  There  is  no  man  hath  a  virtue  that  he  hath  not 
a  glimpse  of,  nor  any  man  an  attaint  but  he  carries  some  stain 
of  it.'  To  represent  him  otherwise  is  a  pious  fiction ;  it  must  go 
its  way  with  those  forms  of  idolatry  which  make  him  out  an  accom- 
plished scholar,  a  trained  lawyer,  an  expounder  in  dramatic 
allegories  of  the  Platonic  philosophy,  or  a  profound  political 
thinker.  In  all  these  matters  he  gives  out  the  impressions  made  on 
him  by  the  life  about  him.  His  painter  in  Timon  is  brilliantly  true 
to  life,  but  about  painting  he  obviously  knew  little  and  cared  less. 
Of  music,  from  '  Sneak's  noise  '  to  ditties 

Sung  by  a  fair  queen  in  a  summer's  bower, 
With  ravishing  division,  to  her  lute, 

he  writes  delightfully,  but  never  like  a  musician.  His  age,  like  our 
own,  was  greatly  concerned  with  tlie  theory  and  practice  of  educa- 
tion;  his  own  chief  contribution  to  the  subject  is  perhaps  in  the 
short  dialogue — 

Canst  not  read.'' 

No. 

There  will  little  learning  die  then,  that  day  thou  art  hanged. 

Legal  phraseology,  as  was  the  habit  of  his  age,  he  uses  copiously, 
even  to  excess ;  but  his  law,  as  distinct  from  this,  is  cither  taken 
straight  from  the  story  or  chronicle  he  was  dramatizing,  or  is 
frank  stage-law,  poetical  justice  unknown  to  any  court  or  code. 
Equally  baseless  is  the  assumption  of  his  anti-democratic  temper. 
In  the  folhcs  of  his  mobs,  as  in  the  sarcasms  of  his  aristocrats,  he 
reflects  the  spirit  of  his  audience  whether  at  Whitehall  or  at  the 
Bankside.  It  is  only  a  further  exemplification  of  this,  that  in  his 
later  work   tlic  tone   changes,   and  he  sounds,   in   Lear  and   else- 


SHAKESPEARE  AFTER  THREE  HUNDRED  YEARS      11 

where,  the  note  of  passionate  pity  for  the  poor.  That  note  is  his 
swift  response  to  the  ground-swell  of  the  new  democracy.  The 
Tudor  dynasty  had  become  extinct,  and  with  it  the  iron  Tudor 
system  of  repression  and  reaction  had  come  to  an  end ;  the  revo- 
lutionary movements  of  the  Stuart  period  were  beginning  to  stir. 
In  these  later  plays,  as  in  the  earlier,  Shakespeare  is  still  giving 
out  what  he  received;  he  makes  vocal,  personifies,  vitalizes  the 
impressions  of  his  actual  environment.  Like  the  poet  in  Timon — a 
sketch  as  vivid  as  its  companion  portrait  of  the  painter — one 
seems  to  hear  him  say  of  his  own  work : 

A  thing  slipped  idly  from  me. 
Our  poesy  is  as  a  gum,  which  oozes 
From  whence  'tis  nourished.    The  fire  i'  the  flint 
Shews  not  till  it  be  struck :  our  gentle  flame 
Provokes  itself,  and,  like  the  current,  flies 
Each  bound  it  chafes. 

Research  has  done  away  with  the  old  thoughtless  idea  that  the 
body  of  work  passing  under  Shakespeare's  name  is  all  his. 
Common  sense  rejects  the  more  extravagant  fancy  that  it  embodies 
a  Summu  Anthropologiae,  a  system  of  human  nature  and  a  direc- 
tory for  human  life.  Yet  that  work  in  its  massed  total  has  another 
if  a  subtler  kind  of  unity.  It  is  not,  any  more  than  with  the  Iliad 
and  Odyssey,  the  unity  of  a  tunica  inconsutUis.  The  amount  of 
non-Shakespearian  work  in  what  is  called  Shakespeare  is  consid- 
erable ;  this  is  so  alike  in  the  earlier  period  when  he  was  adapting 
and  piecing  out  older  men's  work,  in  the  later  period  when  younger 
men  were  doing  the  same  with  his,  and  even  between  the  two,  where 
the  stage-text  that  has  survived  has  been  altered  for  performance 
by  members  of  the  company  or  by  Irresponsible  actors.  Kemp  the 
comedian  is  said  to  have  been  turned  out  of  the  company  of  the 
Globe  because  he  gagged  to  an  extent  beyond  what  the  play- 
wrights and  his  fellow  actors  could  stand ;  and  this  was  just  after 
he  had  made  a  great  success  in  the  '  creation,'  to  use  the  modem 
slang,  of  Dogberry.  How  much  of  our  Dogberry  is  Shakespeare, 
how  much  Kemp?  Macbeth  has  notoriously  reached  us  in  a  muti- 
lated form,  with  interpolations  as  well  as  cuts  ;  and  whether  the  gag 
in  the  famous  scene  of  the  knocking  at  the  gate  is  Shakespeare's 
own,  or  not,  or  partly  both,  is  a  question  which  will  always  be  ar- 
gued and  always  be  interesting.  The  unity  of  Shakespeare  (again, 
like  the  unity  of  Homer)  is  that  of  the  Shakespearian  touch,  the 
Shakespearian  inspiration,  which  spreads  through  and  vivifies  all 


12  ANNUAL  SHAKESPEARE  LECTURE,  1916 

the  work  he  laid  his  finger  upon.  By  merely  passing  his  hand  over 
a  play,  he  made  it  different;  he  Shakespearianized  it.  Hence  what, 
to  borrow  a  phrase  from  another  art,  maj^  be  called  the  flooding 
of  his  colour  in  composite  work.  Between  what  is  pure  Shake- 
speare and  what  is  wholly  non-Shakespearian  the  difference  is  as 
obvious  as  it  is  immense.  But  who  will  undertake  to  say,  in  parts 
of  2  Henry  VI,  whether  we  are  faced  with  Marlowe  filled  in  by 
Shakespeare,  or  Shakespeare  writing  like  Marlowe,  as  he  still  did 
in  King  John?  in  parts  of  Henry  VIII,  with  Fletcher  writing  (as 
near  as  he  could)  like  Shakespeare,  or  Shakespeare  writing  (as 
he  easily  could  if  he  chose)  like  Fletcher.''  A  few  touches  of  the 
master  hand  have  worked  wonders  in  the  coarse  and  repulsive 
iragedv  of  Titus  Andronicus.  The  scenes  which  he  contributed  to 
"Wilkins'  Pericles  send  out  as  it  were  streamers  and  flashes  that 
light  up  the  whole  play  and  make  us  glad  to  read  over  and  over 
again  what,  without  this  irradiation,  we  should  hardly  have  the 
patience  to  read  twice.  No  other  dramatist  of  the  age  had  that 
flooding  and  irradiating  power.  When .  they  collaborated,  they 
either  mixed  mechanically,  or  combined,  at  best,  into  something 
which  does  not  bear  the  impress  of  a  single  welding  and  controlling 
genius.  In  the  Two  Noble  Kinsmen,  the  sharp  lines  of  cleavage — 
so  distinct  that  one  can  even  see  where  Fletcher  wrote  in  half  a 
dozen  lines  in  a  Shakespearian  scene — show  that  it  was  not  a 
joint  work,  one  which  Shakespeare  partly  wrote  and  wholly  influ- 
enced, but  a  case  of  Fletcher  stringing  together,  and  writing  up 
into  a  play  of  his  own  sort,  detached  scenes  which  Shakespeare 
had  written,  and  had  very  probably  left  in  the  Globe  library'  among 
otlier  unregarded  trifles. 

Appreciation  must  be  based  on  comprehension.  We  can  best 
honour,  as  we  can  only  appreciate  Shakespeare,  by  reading  him. 
This  is  not  a  portentous  platitude;  for  it  is  what  few  people  do. 
We  all  read  in  him,  which  is  a  different  thing;  we  most  of  us  read 
into  him,  which  is  a  different  thing  again,  and  a  more  dangerous 
one.  The  Poet  Laureate,  in  the  preface  to  his  Sjnrit  of  Man, 
gives  the  pointed  and  wise  caution  that  these  are  waters  to  bathe 
rather  than  to  fish  in.  No  one  has  begun  to  understand  Shake- 
speare who  has  not  read  his  plays  as  a  whole,  as  a  single  body  of 
work.  Needless  difficulties  have  been  put  in  the  way  of  doing  this 
by  the  artificial  and  often  preposterous  order  in  which,  ever  since 
their  first  collection,  they  have  been  arranged.  He  loses  b}'  this 
much  as  the  Old  and  New  Testament  do;  at  least  it  would  be  so 
if  people  ever  read  either  the  Bible  or  Shakespeare  from  end  to 


SHAKESPEARE  AFTER  THREE  HUNDRED  YEARS      13 

end.  But  people  would  be  more  likeh'  to  do  that,  as  they  could  do 
it  with  fresh  understanding,  if  both  volumes  were  not  set  out  with 
an  almost  heroic  disregard  of  order  and  chronology. 

The  precise  date  and  order  of  the  plays  arc  not  indeed  fully 
ascertainable.  Groups  overlap ;  the  precise  place  of  a  play  within 
a  group  is  often  uncertain ;  and  with  some  at  least,  which  were 
repeatedly  recast  and  revised,  it  ma^-  be  arguable  whether  to  place 
them,  in  the  form  they  have  reached  us,  at  an  earlier  or  later  point 
in  the  list.  But  with  this  rcsen-ation,  and  subject  to  a  margin  of 
error  which  is  not  great,  it  is  possible  to  read  the  plays  through 
in  the  order  of  their  composition ;  and  to  do  so  opens  Shakespeare 
out  like  a  new  world.  He  becomes  solid  and  continuous :  the  planes 
come  out,  the  lines  of  growth  tell,  the  methods  manifest  them- 
selves. It  is  of  no  little  moment  to  see  his  work  thus  unroll  itself. 
Without  the  intelligence  that  pours  in  from  this  large  continuous 
reading  of  Shakespeare  '  one  ma}^ '  in  his  own  words  '  reach  deep 
enough  and  yet  find  little.'  To  bathe  in  Shakespeare  is  different 
from  floundering  and  wallowing  in  him.     It  is 

a  course  more  promising 
Than  a  wild  dedication  of  yourselves 
To  unpath'd  waters,  undream'd  shores: 

nor,  voyaged  over  with  such  a  clue,  do  shores  and  waters  Icse  any- 
thing of  their  marvel  and  richness. 

The  four  earliest  plays  are  trial-pieces ;  careful  experiments  in 
four  different  dramatic  forms,  on  three  at  least  of  which  he  spent 
much  work  in  revision  and  remodelling.  He  begins  with  the  mixed 
drama  of  criticism  and  satire — what  would  now  be  called  a  revue — ■ 
in  Love's  Labour's  Lost,  then  takes  up  romantic  comedy  in  the 
Two  Gentlemen,  romantic  tragedy  in  Romeo  and  Juliet,  and  tradi- 
tional Plautine  comedy  in  the  Comedy  of  Errors.  After  thus 
feeling  his  way  and  proving  his  competence,  he  works  mainlv  on 
English  history-plays  for  the  new  Rose  Theatre  for  about  three 
years.  First  he  adapts  and  revises  plays  already  produced,  re- 
touching Kyd,  remodelling  Peele  and  Greene,  collaborating  Avith 
Marlowe;  then  entirely  rewrites  an  older  King  John,  and  carries 
forward  the  series  unassisted  in  Richard  II  and  Richard  III. 
Next,  letting  loose  as  it  were  the  accumulated  pressure  of 
romantic  imagination,  he  flowers  out  into  A  Midsummer  Xighfs 
Dream,  the  loveliest  and  most  exquisitely  finished  of  all  poetic 
romances.  After  some  light  work  in  comedy,  a  marked  break  fol- 
lows, the  only  one  in  the  twenty  years  of  his  dramatic  activity. 


14  ANNUAL  SHAKESPEARE  LECTURE,  1916 

Then  he  resumes  history  in  the  double  play  of  Henry  IV  with  new 
richness  and  amplitude.  The  Globe  Theatre  is  built,  and  he  be- 
comes a  full  partner  in  the  ownership  and  management.  For  its 
opening  season  he  writes  the  great  spectacular  history  of  Henry  F, 
and  follows  it  up  with  the  three  central  comedies,  all  produced,  with 
incredible  speed,  in  little  more  than  a  year.  He  was  then  thirty- 
five,  just  at  the  mezzo  del  camin  di  nostra  vita;  it  is  the  annus 
mirabilis  of  his  life,  and  of  the  English  drama. 
Then  he  makes  a  swift  transition. 

He  was  dispos'd  to  mirth,  but  on  the  sudden 
A  Roman  thought  hath  struck  him, 

and  with  Julius  Caesar  he  opens"  the  period  of  the  great  tragedies. 
They  were  written  for  what  had  become  a  more  educated,  more 
intelligent,  probably  more  exacting  audience ;  and  more  particu- 
larly, for  production  before  a  Court  which,  in  a  time  empty,  his- 
torians tell  us,  of  political  events,  was  giving  not  only  patronage 
but  serious  attention  to  the  drama.  '  These  three  years,'  he  makes 
Hamlet  say  in  1602,  '  I  have  taken  note  of  it,  the  age  is  grown  so 
picked  that  the  toe  of  the  peasant  comes  near  the  heel  of  the 
courtier':  and  the  courtier  too  (as  in  Hamlet)  was  imposing  his 
own  choice  of  treatment  on  the  playwright.  Shakespeare  moved 
on  the  crest  of  the  wave.  Hamlet  is  not  only  a  tremendous  reac- 
tion from  Twelfth  Night,  it  is  the  recognition  of  a  new  age  with 
new  requirements.  Troilus  and  Cressida,  following  on  it,  is  the 
by-product  or  backwash  of  that  gigantic  achievement,  as  a  few 
years  earlier  the  Merry  Wives  had  been  of  Henry  IV,  as  a  few 
years  later  Titnon  is  of  Lear.  The  new  reign  carried  forward  a 
movement  already  begun.  The  '  princely  '  drama  of  Beaumont 
shows  the  culmination  of  the  influence  to  which  Shakespeare  had 
already  fully  responded  when  Othello,  Macbeth,  and  Lear  were 
produced  before  the  Court  at  Whitehall.  In  the  super-drama — a 
name  applicable  here  if  an^'where — of  Antony  and  Cleopatra, 
tragedy  is  expanding  into  something  beyond  itself.  We  are  on 
the  brink  of  a  new  dramatic  revolution.  Within  the  same  year 
Philaster  took  the  world  captive  by  a  fresh  and  enchanting  dra- 
matic manner.    After  it,  Shakespeare  writes  no  more  tragedies. 

The  vogue  of  Beaumont's  great  colleague  had  then  begun.  To 
Fletcher's  agile  flexible  workmanship  Shakespeare  shows  none  of 
tlic  jealousy  of  an  older  artist,  none  of  that  suspicion  of  new 
methods  which  is  so  common  among  writers  of  established  position. 
He  responded  to  this  influence  as  to  others.  In  the  opening  scene 
of  Coriolanus  there  are  traces  of  Fletcher's  manner,  if  not  of  his 


SHAKESPEARE  AFTER  THREE  HUNDRED  YEARS      15 

actual  hand.  When  Shakespeare  retired  Fletcher  formally  suc- 
ceeded him  as  head  dramatist  of  the  company.  The  brief  age  of 
high  concentration  was  over.  In  twenty  years  the  English  drama 
passed  from  the  fiery  dawn  of  Marlowe  to  the  moonlit  dusk  of 
Massinger.  The  interval  was  its  day,  the  day  of  Shakespeare. 
Before  it  faded  away  into  the  comedy  of  manners  and  the  tragedy 
of  sentiment,  it  had  put  out  new  growths :  for  Court  representa- 
tions, the  masque ;  for  popular  audiences,  loosely  woven  melo- 
dramatic romance.  This  change  of  current  also  Shakespeare  fol- 
lowed before  he  quitted  the  theatre.  He  put  a  few  pages  of  his 
own  finest  work  into  an  artless  and  ill-written  chronicle-romance 
by  a  hack-writer.  He  produced,  in  Cymhdine  and  The  Winter^s 
Tale,  two  beautiful  romances  of  his  own,  adapting  for  the  latter 
the  sketch  of  a  tragedy  perhaps  already  written.  In  The  Tem- 
pest he  recognized  and,  as  it  were,  sanctioned  the  masque  before 
he  finally  gave  the  reins  of  dramatic  control  into  the  hands  of  the 
after-born. 

His  own  last  appearance  on  the  stage  is  believed  to  have  been  in 
this  piece.  In  the  epilogue  to  it,  which,  though  spoken  by 
Prospero,  is  not  part  of  the  play  and  is  not  necessarily  dramatic, 
we  seem  for  once  to  hear  Shakespeare's  own  voice,  the  voice  of 
one  making  his  final  acquiescence : 

Now  my  charms  are  all  o'erthrown 
And  what  strength  I  have  's  my  own. 
Which  is  most  faint.     Now  I  want 
Spirits  to  enforce,  art  to  enchant. 

*  We  are  Time's  subjects,  and  time  bids  begone.'  The  lines  may  be 
set  beside  and  balanced  against  what  is  the  earliest  extant  piece  of 
Shakespeare's  writing,  the  opening  words  of  Love's  Labour's  Lost: 

Let  fame,  that  all  hunt  after  in  their  lives, 
Live  registered  upon  our  brazen  tombs 
And  then  grace  us  in  the  disgrace  of  death. 

It  is  tempting  to  read  into  these  lines  a  preluding  trumpet-flourish 
of  his  own  young  ambition;  but  though  tempting,  unjustified. 
They  are  Shakespeare  catching  and  repeating  (yet  repeating, 
as  always,  with  a  difference)  the  accent  of  Marlowe.  But  the 
fame  that  was  in  his  own  mind  was  likely,  at  the  time,  less  that  to 
be  gained  by  '  still  climbing  after  knowledge  infinite '  than  the 
more  obvious  glory  of  Tamburlaine's  copper-laced  coat  and 
crimson  velvet  breeches — one  of  the  earliest  sights  to  dazzle  his 
eyes  when  he  came  to  London.     The  Sonnets  show  him  wincing 


16  ANNUAL  SHAKESPEARE  LECTURE,  1916 

under  the  soilure  of  an  actor's  profession,  yet  realizing  that  all 
fame,  great  and  small,  is  alike  transitory,  and 

lays  great  bases  for  eternity 
Which  prove  more  short  than  waste  or  ruining. 

From  the  early  days  when  he  was 

Like  one  that  stands  upon  a  promontor}^ 
And  spies  a  far-off  shore  where  he  would  tread 

until  the  end,  we  seem  to  hear  him  saying 

On: 

Things  that  are  past  are  done  with  me: 

and  if  lie  dallied  with  the  fancy  that 

Time,  with  his  fairer  hand 
Offering  the  fortunes  of  his  former  days, 
The  former  man  may  make  him, 

he  was  surely  too  cognizant  of  life  to  dream  of  any  Medea's  magic 
that '  embalms  and  spices  to  the  April-day  again.' 

From  first  to  last  Shakespeare  is  not  an  inventor  or  innovator. 
He  follows  all  the  inventions,  takes  them  up  and  weighs  them,  puts 
into  them,  where  he  uses  them,  his  own  masterly  technique,  his 
own  vitality.  It  is  the  same  with  his  poems.  Venus  and  Adonis  is 
modelled  on  Lodge ;  Lucrece,  even  more  closel}',  on  Daniel.  The 
composition  of  the  Sonnets  was  in  an}'^  case  after  the  sonnet- 
sequence  had  become  fashionable,  and  according  to  what  seems  the 
most  reasonable  view,  was  after  that  poetical  metliod  had  passed 
its  climax  and  begun  to  be  old-fashioned.  Perhaps  his  only 
innovation  in  poetical  form — and  it  was  one  wliich  he  took  up 
lightly,  and  which  had  no  great  result — ^^^'as  the  unrhymcd  sonnet, 
of  which  two  exquisite  specimens  may  be  found,  by  those  who  will 
look  for  tlicm,  in  the  Txco  Gentlemen  and  the  first  part  of 
Jlcnry  IV.  In  tlie  management  of  metre  indeed — in  his  handling 
and  development  of  the  flexible  dramatic  blank  verse — he  explored 
as  well  as  perfected.  The  secret  of  his  later  versification  remains 
his,  and  all  attempts  to  recreate  it  have  been  vain.  Otherwise,  it 
is  almost  as  thougli  he  deliberately  refused  to  make  any  new 
experiments  of  his  own.  What  was  about  him,  in  art  as  in  life, 
was  good  enough  for  him. 

Sufflnntinandus  erat,  '  tlio  brake  had  to  be  put  on  him,'  is  Jon- 
son's  remark  on  Shakespeare's  amazing  fluency. 

Faster  than  spring-time  sliowers  comes  thought  on  thought, 


SHAKESPEARE  AFTER  THREE  HUNDRED  YEARS      IT 

and  the  expression  never  lags  behind.  Words  were  with  him  like 
persons  and  things ;  none  escaped  his  notice,  none  did  not  impress 
him,  none  slipped  his  memory.  His  vocabulary  still  remains  the 
largest  of  anj  English  author ;  in  light  and  in  serious  use,  he  pours 
it  out  with  equally  facile  mastery.  Listen  to  it  in  the  mouth  of 
Prince  Hal,  pretending  to  speak  in  his  father's  person : 

There  is  a  devil  haunts  thee  in  the  likeness  of  an  old  fat  man, 
a  tun  of  man  is  thj'  companion ;  why  dost  thou  converse  with  that 
trunk  of  humours,  that  bolting-hutch  of  beastliness,  that  swollen 
parcel  of  dropsies,  that  huge  bombard  of  sack,  that  stuffed  cloak- 
bag  of  guts,  that  roasted  Manningtree  ox  with  the  pudding  in  his 
belly,  that  reverend  vice,  that  grey  iniquity,  that  father  ruffian, 
that  vanity  in  years.'' 

and  compare  that  torrent  of  dancing  language  with  the  gravely 
copious  eloquence  of  a  serious  speech : 

Piety  and  fear. 
Religion  to  the  gods,  peace,  justice,  truth. 
Domestic  awe,  night-rest  and  neighbourhood, 
Instruction,  manners,  mysteries  and  trades. 
Degrees,  observances,  customs  and  laws : 

or  with  another  passage  not  more  nobly  expressed  though  more 
widely  known: 

Degree,  priority,  and  place, 
Insisture,  course,  proportion,  season,  form. 
Office  and  custom,  in  all  line  of  order; 
The  unity  and  married  calm  of  states. 
Degrees  in  schools,  and  brotherhoods  in  cities. 
Peaceful  commerce  from  dividable  shores. 
The  primogenitive  and  due  of  birth. 
Prerogative  of  age,  crowns,  sceptres,  laurels. 

That  gigantic  superflux  of  language  never  spreads  out  into  the 
stagnation  of  verbosity ;  it  is  never  '  chough's  language,  gabble 
enough  and  good  enough  ' ;  for  every  word  in  the  swarm  is  alive 
and  stings.     His  words 

as  pages  followed  him 
Even  at  the  heels,  in  golden  multitudes, 
and  they 

enter  in  our  ears  like  great  triumphers 
In  their  applauding  gates. 


18  ANNUAL  SHAKESPEARE  LECTURE,  1916 

The  impressions  of  language,  spoken  or  written,  *  he  took  as  we  do 
air,  fast  as  'tis  ministered.'  Even  in  his  involved  elliptic  later  style 
he  keeps  that  sheer  mastery,  never 

like  one  lost  in  a  thorny  wood 
That  rents  the  thorns  and  is  rent  with  the  thorns, 
Seeking  a  way  and  straying  from  the  way, 
Not  knowing  how  to  find  the  open  air, 
But  toiling  desperateh'  to  find  it  out; 

but  rather,  as  has  been  picturesquely  said  of  him,  '  crashing 
through  the  forest  of  words  like  a  thunderbolt,  crushing  them  out 
of  shape  if  they  don't  fit  in,  melting  moods  and  tenses,  and  leaving 
people  to  gape  at  the  transformation.' 

And  so,  when  he  puts  the  brake  on,  he  can  concentrate  this 
power,  and  charge  half  a  dozen  simple  words  with  all  the  accumu- 
lated force  that  he  holds  in  reserve.  An  accomplished  critic  has 
cited  the  description  in  Mr.  Conrad's  Typhoon  of  the  continuous 
roar  of  the  elements  swallowing  up  all  other  sounds,  and  contrasts 
with  that  elaborate  and  impressive  passage  a  line  and  a  half  of 
Shakespeare : 

The  seaman's  whistle 
Is  as  a  whisper  in  the  ears  of  death, 
Unheard. 

*  This  is  the  lion's  claw,'  he  adds ;  '  no  other  man  could  so  strike 
with  words.'  In  many  such  strokes — from  the  awful  *  And 
Cassandra  laughed  '  of  Pandarus,  to  Albany's  soundless  '  Even  so : 
cover  their  faces,'  or  the  whisper  of  Imogen  '  I  hope  I  dream,'  a 
few  words  of  extreme  simplicity  carry  in  them  an  unequalled  sense 
of  vastness,  an  all  but  intolerable  poignancy. 

'  His  mind  and  hand  went  together,'  Shakespeare's  colleagues 
wrote  of  him.  But  no  hand,  not  even  his,  could  keep  abreast  of  his 
swift  envisagcment  of  dramatic  action,  or  of  the  crowd  of  words 
that  rushed  to  express  it.  More  and  more,  as  he  goes  on,  we  see 
him,  if  not  unable,  at  least  too  impatient  to  deploy  his  forces. 
Language  poured  in  on  him  faster  than  he  could  put  it  down,  and 
he  came  more  and  more  to  drive  through  it,  one  thought  or  image 
treading  so  hard  on  the  heels  of  another  that  they  became  merged 
and  fused.  Just  the  same  thing  happened  to  his  versification.  The 
metrical  pattern  is  always  there,  but  as  the  loom  flies  it  is  crushed 
into  vast  deviations.  Many  passages  in  which  we  still  feel  the 
metrical  structure  can  only  be  printed  as  prose,  because  the 
rhythms    of  speech   have   outrun    the    framework    and   got   quite 


•i 


SHAKESPEARE  AFTER  THREE  HUNDRED  YEARS      19 

beyond  the  compass  of  the  pattern.  But  in  the  most  irregular  the 
sense  of  pattern  is  not  really  lost,  it  only  is  submerged  and  re- 
emerges.  Both  as  regards  putting  thoughts  into  words  and  as 
regards  putting  words  into  verse,  he  gives  the  impression  of  tiie 
whole  content  of  a  speech  or  a  scene  rising  in  his  mind  together, 
and  of  his  getting  down  on  paper  as  much  of  it  as  he  can,  in  what 
order  and  form  he  can.  His  apprehension  is  simultaneous,  not 
consecutive.  And  this  applies  to  the  action  as  well  as  to  the  lan- 
guage of  the  plan's.  Only  one  or  two,  and  none  of  the  later  plays, 
give  the  impression  of  having  been  composed  from  a  scenario. 
The  action  seems  to  rise  before  the  dramatist  as  a  single  complex 
whole;  in  translating  this  into  concrete  actable  form  he  is  obliged 
to  sort  it  out  into  sequence,  but  he  does  not  aim  at  more  than 
dramatic  coherence,  than  the  degree  of  consecutiveness  that  satisfies 
an  audience.  If  analj'sed  further  the  action  in  the  plays  presents 
gaps,  inconsistencies,  sometimes  even  impossibilities.  That  Shake- 
speare left  it  so  was  from  no  deep  plan.  Yet  art  here  once  more 
triumphantly  justifies  the  artist:  for  it  is  just  this  massed,  partially 
incoherent  treatment  which,  as  much  as  anything  else,  keeps  his 
plays  from  suggesting  mechanism  and  makes  them  so  startling  a 
likeness  of  life.  The  vague  dissatisfaction  left  (as  its  best  admirers 
have  allowed)  by  As  You  Like  It  is  due  less  to  any  particular  flaw 
than  to  a  subconscious  impression  of  artificial  flawlessness.  The 
inconsistencies  which  no  ingenuity  can  explain  away  in  Othello  or 
Hamlet  give  these  plays  no  slight  part  of  their  arresting  and  com- 
pelling power;  they  give,  in  a  way  that  no  other  dramatist  (unless 
it  be  Sophocles)  has  ever  equalled,  the  awful  and  enigmatic  quality 
of  life.  They  keep  us  from  '  ensconcing  ourselves  into  seeming 
knowledge,  when  we  should  submit  ourselves  to  an  unknown 
fear.' 

Shakespeare  is  not  a  moral  teacher.  He  lets  morality  take  care 
■of  itself;  what  he  sets  before  us  is  life.  Cruelty,  falsehood,  inhu- 
manity, treachery  are  represented  by  him,  as  are  heroism,  truth, 
self-sacrifice:  but  they  are  neither  approved  nor  condemned,  they 
are  only  displa3'ed,  as  causes  with  their  effects,  or  it  may  be  with 
their  strange  apparent  effectlessness.  Lady  Capulet's  plan  to  have 
Homeo  poisoned  in  Mantua,  Cymbeline's  order  for  the  massacre  in 
cold  blood  of  all  his  Roman  prisoners,  are  presented  without  com- 
ment, and  produce  no  result.  The  lesson,  if  it  can  be  called  one,  of 
Shakespeare  (as  of  Sophocles)  is  that  we  should  not  draw  lessons, 
but  see  and  feel  and  understand.  Their  attitude  towards  the  virtues 
is  that  they  are  virtues,  that  good  is  different  from  evil.     If  it  is 


20  ANNUAL  SHAKESPEARE  LECTURE,  1916 

part  of  the  scheme  of  things  (as  does  not  always  appear)  that 
there  is  a  power  which  works  for  righteousness,  that  is  only  one 
fact  of  life  like  others.  Shakespeare  does  not  teach ;  he  illuminates. 
In  liis  clear  daylight  we  see  the  world.  The  exaltation  with  which 
even  his  darkest  tragedies  leave  us  comes  of  our  having,  through 
him,  seen  it  as  it  is,  neither  good  nor  bad  in  any  strict  meaning, 
but  wonderful.  Goneril  and  Cordelia,  lago  and  Othello,  are  alike 
parts  of  life :  '  he  maketh  his  sun  to  rise  on  the  evil  and  on  the 
good,  and  sendeth  rain  on  the  just  and  on  the  unjust.'  And  it  is 
not  the  lesson  of  Shakespeare,  but  the  lesson  of  life,  borne  in  upon 
us  through  that  image  of  life  which  Shakfespeare  holds  up  be- 
fore us,  that  good  is  not  only  different  from  evil,  but  better  than 
evil. 

Nor,  any  more  than  he  is  a  teacher  of  morals,  is  Shakespeare 
a  teacher  of  patriotism.  The  love  and  praise  of  England  which  he 
makes  his  great  Englishmen  utter  are  theirs,  not  his  ;  only  he  makes 
them  express  themselves  as  none  but  he  could  do.  In  clearing  our 
minds  of  idolatry,  we  must  take  into  accourt  not  such  passages 
only,  too  familiar  for  citation,  too  august  for  praise : 

England,  hedged  in  with  the  main, 
Tliat  water-walled  bulwark,  still  secure 
And  confident  from  foreign  purposes: 

This  England  never  did  nor  never  shall 
Lie  at  the  proud  foot  of  a  conqueror : 

Tliis  royal  throne  of  kings,  this  scepter'd  isle, 
England,  bound  in  with  the  triumphant  sea : 

not  only  these,  but  the  representations,  equally  sympathetic  because 
equally  dramatic,  of  the  merely  vulgar  attitude  of  mind  towards 
one's  native  country,  and  of  the  narrow  insular  prejudice  against 
foreigners — the  swagger  about  the  boy  (not  yet  born)  '  that  shall 
go  to  Constantinople  and  take  the  Turk  by  the  beard,'  and  the 
ignorant  conceit  which  sets  down  all  Frenchmen  as  braggarts,  all 
Germans  as  sots,  and  all  Italians  as  fiends.  For  the  highest 
illumination  and  inspiration,  at  a  time  like  the  present,  one  would 
turn  neither  to  one  nor  the  other.  These  may  be  found  rather  in 
the  expression  of  a  temper  at  once  simpler  and  larger,  May  I  cite 
two  instances.'' 

One  is  the  Gloucestershire  recruit,  with  his  sound  lieart  and  his 
inarticulate  speech,  the  true  ancestor  of  hundreds  of  thousands  of 
his  countrymen  now  who  have  never  read  Shakespeare,  who  have 
never   thought    much    or    deeply,   whom    eloquence,   rhetoric,    and 


SHAKESPEARE  AFTER  THREE  HUNDRED  YEARS      21 

poetry  would  leave  quite  unstirred,  l)ut  wlio,  like  liim,  know  ili<,'ir 
duty  and  do  it : 

I  care  not;  a  man  can  die  but  once.  We  owe  God  a  doatli :  I'll 
ne'er  bear  a  base  mind ;  an't  be  my  destiny,  so ;  an't  bo  not,  so.  No 
man  is  too  good  to  serv^e  bis  prince;  and  let  it  go  wbicli  way  it  will, 
he  that  dies  this  year  is  quit  for  the  next. 

*  Well  said ;  thou'rt  a  good  fellow,'  answers  the  non-commis- 
sioned officer  of  the  recruiting  party. 

The  other  is  the  speech  of  the  Greolc  commander-in-chief,  when 
a  bitter  and  obstinate  war  was  dragging  heavily,  when  early  hopes 
of  success  had  been  falsified,  and  the  national  councils  were  dis- 
tracted, the  allied  arms  thwarted,  by  wrangling  and  recriminations : 

Princes, 
What  grief  hath  set  the  iaundice  on  vour  cheeks? 
The  ample  proposition  that  hope  makes 
In  all  designs  begun  on  earth  below 
Fails  in  the  promised  largeness :  checks  and  disasters 
Grow  in  the  veins  of  actions  highest  reared. 
Nor,  princes,  is  it  matter  new  to  us 
That  we  come  short  of  our  suppose  so  far 
That,  after  seven  years'  siege,  yet  Troy  walls  stand : 
Sith  every  action  that  hath  gone  before 
Whereof  we  have  record,  trial  did  draw 
Bias  and  thwart,  not  answering  the  aim 
And  that  unbodied  figure  of  the  thought 
That  gave  't  surmised  shape.     Wliv  thou,  von  princes, 
Do  you  with  cheelcs  abashed  behold  our  works. 
And  call  them  shames,  which  are  indeed  nought  else 
But  the  protractive  trials  of  great  Jove 
To  find  persistive  constancy  in  men? 

Once  more,  Shakespeare  here  does  not  teach :  ho  illuminates.  The 
lesson  of  life,  the  fact  of  life,  which  he  licrhts  up  for  us  is  that 
patriotism  is  not  only  different  from,  but  hotter  than,  wnnt  of 
patriotism.  He  docs  not  teach  this  as  a  lesson ;  he  presents  it  as 
a  fact. 

And  in  the  lessons,  if  we  will  call  them  so.  or  the  facts  of  life,  the 
ultimate  and  central  fact  is  its  power  of  solf-ronowal : 

If  the  ill  spirit  have  so  fair  a  house. 
Good  things  will  strive  to  dwell  with  't. 

To  the  lips  of  each  new  generation  comes  the  ecstatic  cry : 


22  ANNUAL  SHAKESPEARE  LECTURE,  1916 

O  wonder! 
How  many  goodly  creatures  are  there  here ! 
How  beauteous  mankind  is  !    O  brave  new  world 
That  has  such  people  in  't ! 

and  the  older  generation  may  realize  this,  and  may  answer,  as 
Prospero  docs  to  Miranda,  with  no  accent  of  sadness  or  of  sarcasm, 
with  no  trace  even  of  some  superior  indulgence,  but  with  full 
thankfulness, 

'Tis  new  to  thee. 

Perhaps,  when  all  is  said,  attempts  to  rectify  our  judgment,  to 
dismiss  and  cancel  outworn  idolatries,  only  leave  us  established  in 
some  fresh  idolatry  of  our  own.  They  leave  us,  at  all  events,  with 
a  feeling  little  short  of  adoration.  '  I  would  abate  him  nothing, 
though  I  profess  myself  his  adorer,  not  his  friend.'  Our  prede- 
cessors of  the  last  three  hundred  years  often  praised  Shakespeare 
(as  they  blamed  him)  amiss: 

Cats,  that  can  judge  as  fitly  of  his  worth 
As  I  can  of  those  mysteries  which  heaven 
Will  not  have  earth  to  know. 

The  mistake  to  which  we,  like  them,  are  subject  is  to  praise  him 
at  all.  No  words  said  of  him  are  more  exactly  true  than  those  of 
one  who,  in  the  last  generation,  was  his  most  impassioned  lover  and 
most  eloquent  interpreter.  After  exhausting  on  Shakespeare  all 
hyperboles  of  laudation,  all  glitter  and  pomp  of  rhetoric,  Swin- 
burne, as  a  poet  and  not  as  a  panegyrist,  wrote  of  him  more  simply 
what  is  the  last  and  the  unsurpassable  word : 

His  praise  is  this,  he  can  be  praised  of  none. 
Man,  woman,  child,  praise  God  for  him  ;  but  he 
Exults  not  to  be  worshipped,  but  to  be. 
He  is ;  and  being,  beholds  his  work  well  done. 

*  T  cannot  last  ever,'  says  Falstaff,  in  one  of  his  cross-flashes  of 
wit  and  insight:  '  it  was  alway  yet  the  trick  of  our  English  nation, 
if  they  have  a  good  thing,  to  make  it  too  common.'  Rut  there  are 
some  good  things  that  cannot  be  made  too  common,  and  that  do  last 
ever.     One  of  these  is  Shakespeare. 


THE  BRITISH  ACADEMY 


ANNUAL  SHAKESPEARE  LECTURES 


I. 

'  WHAT  TO  EXPECT  OF  SHAKESPEARE,'  by 
J.  J.  JUSSERAND.     1911. 

n. 

'  CORIOLANUS,'  by  A.  C.  BRADLEY.     191^. 

III. 

'  SHAKESPEARE  AND  GERMANY/  by  ALOIS 
BRANDL.     1913. 

IV. 
'  HAMLET  AND  ORESTES :  A  STUDY  IN  TRA- 
DITIONAL  TYPES,'  by  GILBERT  MURRAY. 

191^. 

V. 
'SHAKESPEARE    AND    THE    ITALIAN    RE- 
NAISSANCE,' by  SIR  SIDNEY  LEE.     1915. 

Price  Twenty-pve  Cents 


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